Read Charles Krauthammer on Barack Obama’s unconscionable amnesty impeachment bait. To begin with, the amnesty proposal is built upon several layers of fraud, ranging from lies about a “do nothing Republican Congress” to lies about Constitutional authority. As to that last, Krauthammer cites to an unimpeachable (pun intended) source:

Third, and most fatal, it is deeply unconstitutional. Don’t believe me. Listen to Obama. He’s repeatedly made the case for years. As in:

“I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books. . . . Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the [immigration] laws on my own. . . . That’s not how our Constitution is written” (July 25, 2011).

”This notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true. . . . There are laws on the books that I have to enforce” (September 28, 2011).

“If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we’re also a nation of laws” (November 25, 2013).

Laws created by Congress, not by executive fiat. That’s what distinguishes a constitutional republic from the banana kind.

Moreover, Obama had control of both houses of Congress during his first two years in office — and did nothing about immigration. So why now?

To find out precisely “why now,” and to learn how deeply cynical and destructive Obama and his administration really are, you’ll have to read the whole thing.

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve re-jiggered these portmanteau posts, with a new name and a new image. I’d like to thank all of you for your suggestions. I’ve gone with a vaguely newsy title and a picture from one of my favorite illustrators, and it just feels right.

I’ll continue tweaking the format until it works optimally. Today, for example, I’ll use mini-titles, instead of numbers, to separate items. Please let me know which system you prefer.

How many did you say died in Gaza? And are you really sure they’re dead?

Col. Richard Kemp (Brit. Army, Ret.) reiterates something we’ve heard before, although that vast numbers of people around the world need to be reminded about on a daily basis: Even as Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties (something America and her allies never did in past wars or in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Obama certainly hasn’t done with his drone strikes of dubious legality in Pakistan), Hamas lies about the nature and number of its casualties:

[W]e know now that Hamas have ordered their people to report all deaths as innocent civilians. We know too that Hamas has a track record of lying about casualties. After Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-09 fighting in Gaza, the IDF estimated that of 1,166 Palestinian deaths, 709 were fighters. Hamas – backed by several NGOs – claimed that only 49 of its fighters had been killed, the rest were innocent civilians. Much later they were forced to admit that the IDF had been right all along and between 600 and 700 of the casualties had in fact been fighters. But the short-memoried media are incapable of factoring this in before broadcasting their ill-founded and inflammatory assertions.

Oh, and regarding my parenthetical point about the Muslim blood on Obama’s own hands, let me just reiterate a poster I created a couple of weeks ago:

In reality, when it comes to deaths in Gaza, official IDF casualty figures point to a somewhat different demographic than legions of dead children: According to the IDF’s calculations, 47% of those who died were terrorist fighters.

There’s one thing more that should make people suspicious about casualty figures issuing from Gaza: Elder of Ziyon noticed that Hamas is re-using a strategy first seen in 2008, when Israel engaged in Operation Cast Lead, trying to shut down Hezbollah: Hamas is dragging children’s dead bodies around to create media-friend, anti-Israel photo ops. I’m not surprised. Islamists have always been renowned for the horrors they inflict on the enemy dead, so it stands to reason that they wouldn’t be squeamish about their own dead.

Given that Hamas, primarily through threats, controls completely the “news” emerging from that region, and given that the media doesn’t want to admit that this limited access dovetails perfectly with its anti-Israel bias, it’s small wonder that The New York Times has taken to slandering its own photographers for their failure to produce any useful, independent photographs from within Hamas.

Michael Oren writes a rich, full-throated, compelling defense of Zionism. It’s not, and should not be, a dirty word. Instead, it’s reviled because it succeeded in a region that many in the world (Muslim autocrats, Leftists, America-haters, anti-Semites) would prefer to see fail.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angrily warned the White House “not to ever second-guess me again” on matters involving Hamas — and followed up by vowing that Israel will deal with Palestinian terrorists on its own terms.

And an illustrated reminder of that point:

UNRWA is Hamas.

One wishes that Bibi could also kick out UNRWA. It’s not just complicit with Hamas, says Daniel Greenfield (aka Sultan Knish) — it is Hamas:

The UNRWA is not an international organization operating in the Middle East. Effectively it’s a local Arab Muslim organization funded and regulated internationally. Since the UNRWA classifies 80% of Gazans as “refugees”, it administers the biggest welfare state in the world on their behalf.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

As I predicted when Obama became president and wooed Iran, it looks as if Israel is developing actual ties with those regimes in the Middle East that fear both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

When it comes to Israel, geography is destiny.

Mark Langham explains that, given Israel’s geographic position, she is both the first and last line between rampant Islam and Europe:

Obama’s unpleasantly mystic relationship to Hamas.

Today — August 4 — is Barack Obama’s 53rd birthday. This August 4th is also the anniversary of Tisha B’ Av, which is the 9th of Av in the ancient Jew calendar (meaning that it’s coincidence that Obama’s birthday coincides with it this year).

Yid With Lid says that, going back to the time of Moses, bad things have happened to the Jewish nation and the Jewish people on Tisha B’Av. Coincidence, of course, isn’t anything more than that — coincidence — but it still is fascinating to see how Obama’s name pops up on the Jewish screen on this day.

Los Angeles pro-Hamas rally reveals that those who oppose Israel also hate America.

I’m a shrinking violet when it comes to rallies. I’m just claustrophobic enough that it’s very difficult for me willingly to go to a situation in which I’ll find myself surrounded by people, many of them hostile. Fortunately for Israel’s defense, Donald Douglas isn’t so shy, so he took the time (and the risk) to check out an pro-Hamas rally down in L.A. Sadly for him, there was no overwhelming spontaneous pro-Israel rally to offset the hate.

Who really wants Obama’s impeachment?

Although there are many conservatives who believe that Obama is committing impeachable offenses, insofar as he’s abrogated legislative power even while abandoning his own executive obligations, no serious conservatives are demanding that he be impeached in the near future. With most of the country opposed to impeachment, doing that would be a suicide mission, especially before the mid-term elections. Nevertheless, talk of impeachment is swirling around the country. Why? Simple. It’s this year’s “war on woman” campaign strategy, aimed at terrifying the base and raising money.

Unlike the War on Women strategy, though, which was merely offensively dishonest, the current strategy is a cynical move that threatens to undermine our constitutional system. Ross Douthat took to the pages of the New York Times to make that argument:

[I]n political terms, there is a sordid sort of genius to the Obama strategy. The threat of a unilateral amnesty contributes to internal G.O.P. chaos on immigration strategy, chaos which can then be invoked (as the president did in a Friday news conference) to justify unilateral action. The impeachment predictions, meanwhile, help box Republicans in: If they howl — justifiably! — at executive overreach, the White House gets to say “look at the crazies — we told you they were out for blood.”

[snip]

This is the tone of the media coverage right now: The president may get the occasional rebuke for impeachment-baiting, but what the White House wants to do on immigration is assumed to be reasonable, legitimate, within normal political bounds.

It is not: It would be lawless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark.

And an American political class that lets this Rubicon be crossed without demurral will deserve to live with the consequences for the republic, in what remains of this presidency and in presidencies yet to come.

Interestingly, when I linked to Douthat’s article on my “real me” Facebook, asking only “Do the ends justify the means?” everyone, Left and Right, was silent. I don’t know what to make of that.

Just because you’re a Native American tribe doesn’t mean you’re a nice tribe.

Years ago, I wrote a post about the Aztecs. The point of that post was that a small band of Spaniards didn’t single-handedly destroy one of the greatest pre-Colombian American empires the world has ever known. Instead, the Spaniards had lots of help from surrounding indigenous Indian populations. These Indians helped because the Aztecs were nothing more or less than the Nazis (or perhaps the Islamists) of the ancient world. They waged perpetual warfare against surrounding tribes, using captives as slaves and as human sacrifices in the bloody rituals that could claim tens of thousands of lives in just a few days.

What reminded me of that old post, and the fact that there was little noble about the Aztec savages, is a challenge to the current-day effort to paint Kit Carson as a genocidal Indian killer for his role in having relocated the Navajo. According to John T. Bennett, just as with the Aztecs, surrounding Native American tribes desperately wanted to see the aggressive, blood-thirsty Navajo go:

The Navajo were so disdained that several neighboring Indian tribes joined in the U.S. mission to relocate them. Interestingly, PBS’s series The Westreveals this point: “When Utes, Pueblos, Hopis and Zunis, who for centuries had been prey to Navajo raiders, took advantage of their traditional enemy’s weakness by following the Americans onto the warpath, the Navajo were unable to defend themselves.”

Reading about that relentless and endless back and forth between hot and cold made me think of these guys:

It also made me think of a classic Twilight Zone episode called The Midnight Sun.

Look who’s horrified by Richard Dawkins’ atheism now.

Although I’ve shifted to an amorphous theism, grounded in Jewish values, as I get older, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to atheists. It takes a lot of faith to have faith, if you know what I mean. I’m no fan of Richard Dawkins, though, because he’s made his name being obnoxious, heaping crude, fact-free invective on Christianity and Judaism.

To give Dawkins credit where it’s due, though, he’s also brave. He’s now turned his anti-religious venom on Islam, something Theo van Gogh discovered is a dangerous thing to do. And here’s where it gets funny: The same people (i.e., Leftists) who applauded Dawkins’ atheism when it was turned on Christians and Jews, are besides themselves with horror that he would dare to defame Islam. Kind of telling, isn’t it? The Left isn’t really atheists, because it doesn’t really care about God one way or another. What it is is anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. Clarity — it’s a good thing.

“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘a**hole’ is.”

As a veteran of arrogant law school professors (not all were arrogant, but enough were), I took more than the usual delight in watching Trey Gowdy make a Leftist law prof squirm as he tried desperately to pretend that Lois Lerner, when she called conservatives “a**holes,” wasn’t showing bias:

I walked away from a traditional law practice more than twenty years ago. At that time, I worked full-time as a research and writing attorney. When kids came along, I worked part-time as a research and writing attorney. When the recession came along, I began to work full-time as a homemaker, mother to my children, and daughter to my elderly mother.

When my husband periodically makes noises about my going back to work full-time, I just look at him funny. I’m too far away and too out-of-shape for that to happen (not to mention that we’d have to pay people lots of money to do what I do for home, children, and mother).

“American life is bifurcating into the undocumented and the overdocumented.”

All the disgrace-afflicted Arabs, whose honor has been defiled, and who have been kissing the boots of the Zionists and the Americans, are collaborating in the killing of Hamas, in the killing of the people in Gaza, in the killing of Islamic Jihad, and in the crushing of the Al-Qassam Brigades. I say to all Arab leaders,” before moving to his right and brandishing a large sword. “By Allah you deserve nothing but this sword. If you are real men, let the real men fight. If you are not real men, support the people of Gaza. Let them fight the Zionist enemy. Where are you Al-Sisi- who purports to be the president of Egypt? Where are the Arab leaders?” Al-Abdalet pondered as he waved the sword on TV. “Saudi Arabia bought $63 billion worth of weapons, which it hoards. Why? Because America showed up and used Iran to scare them: “Iran is a boogeyman, coming for you. You’d better watch out.”

Without thinking of this video:

It’s picture time!

I have my doubts about the veracity of this image (it’s entirely possible that the boys were just being punished, Pally-style, for being naughty), but I include it here FWIW.

If you read only one thing today (and tomorrow too), I think you should read Sam Harris’s “Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?” In it, Harris, who is renowned for his very well-articulated atheism, explains that one doesn’t have to believe in Israel’s religious right to the land in order to support her in the current war with Hamas.

The article is very dense, but never boring or confusing. Harris methodically works his way through the case for Israel. He’s not a starry-eyed Israel fan. He is, instead, a realist who feels that any moral compass, atheist or religious, must come down on the side that values human life, rather than the one that destroys it.

To whet your appetite, here’s just one very small segment of his entire article:

The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields? Well, Hamas certainly does. They shoot their rockets from residential neighborhoods, from beside schools, and hospitals, and mosques. Muslims in other recent conflicts, in Iraq and elsewhere, have also used human shields. They have laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies.

Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. That is the difference we’re talking about. The Israelis and other Western powers are deterred, however imperfectly, by the Muslim use of human shields in these conflicts, as we should be. It is morally abhorrent to kill noncombatants if you can avoid it. It’s certainly abhorrent to shoot through the bodies of children to get at your adversary. But take a moment to reflect on how contemptible this behavior is. And understand how cynical it is. The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants. [Note: The term “Muslims” in this paragraph means “Muslim combatants” of the sort that Western forces have encountered in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The term “jihadists” would have been too narrow, but I was not suggesting that all Muslims support the use of human shields or are anti-Semitic, at war with the West, etc.]

Once you’ve read the whole thing, please share it with everyone. It deserves to make the rounds.

** 2 **

Hamas is so determined to win the war against Israel by having the tallest pile of dead bodies that it physically beats people who try to evacuate buildings after receiving Israel’s humanitarian warnings that it will be bombing the buildings. And that, of course, is precisely Sam Harris’s point.

** 3 **

As a writer, one of the most incredibly flattering things that can happen is when someone you really respect takes one of your ideas and runs with it. That’s what happened when Neo-Neocon read my post about John Kerry’s history repeating itself. I don’t want to give anything away. Just go and read what she has to say, making my original germ of an idea much richer and more meaningful.

** 4 **

What is that saying about the Left corrupting all institutions over time? I forget the exact words, but that’s precisely what happened to George H.W. Bush’s Thousand Points of Light charity. From being an innocuous charity, it’s managed to go from the ridiculous (funding gay and lesbian bands all over the world) to the malignant (funding organizations with Islamic terrorist ties).

That the Left would co-opt an organization in this way isn’t news. What is news is that Sen. Sam Nunn’s daughter, Michelle, was CEO during the charity’s transition from charitable to Leftist political. She’s now running for the Senate in Georgia (as a Democrat, natch). She’s trailing the Republican candidate, but the election would be safer if she were trailing even more — and this story should be the nail in her campaign’s coffin.

** 6 **

What unites Americans? Floods of illegal aliens crossing the United States’ southern border. They don’t like it. They really don’t like it.

Not that this will deter Obama. He views amnesty as a convenient red flag he can wave before Republicans in the hope that they will seek to impeach him, rousing Democrats from their demoralized torpor and swinging the 2014 election in Obama’s favor.

Think about this: Our president, who swore to obey the Constitution, is deliberately violating it, at great cost to our nation, so as to achieve two goals: (1) Creating a Democrat demographic wave by wiping out our southern border and (2) tempting Republicans into a politically fatal maneuver.

For Obama, it’s a win any way he looks at it, and for Republicans and other American loving people, all outcomes are disastrous. (And yes, executive orders can easily be overruled, but do you see anyone having the political will to deport all 5 million newly amnestied illegals, including the hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals?)

I cannot think of a more appalling attack on the integrity of a judicial system than a judge having an affair with the wife in a divorce case over which he is presiding. The husband, unsurprisingly, would like to see the judge in court, only this time with the judge sitting at the defendant’s table. Sadly, thanks to judicial immunity, that won’t be happening. Wade McCree, Jr., is out of a job, but he gets to keep his money.

Long-time readers know that, having come of age as a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Leftist judges infest the bench, I have almost no respect for judges. In my career, I’ve probably come across three whom I respect, one of whom is a long-time friend I respected before she became a judge.

In a system governed by the rule of law, we definitely need judges. But we need a very specific type of judge: Someone who recognize the rule of law, not the rule of Leftist navel-gazing and self-indulgent emotional masturbation.

Yesterday, I went to an exhibition soccer game — Real Madrid versus Inter Milan. The game, held in UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, was sold out. Despite that, it was a surprisingly lackluster game.

I think that flat feeling arose from a combination of factors. First, it wasn’t a real game, with real consequences. The players, mostly B-List players for both teams, looked more as if they were practicing than competing. Second, the mellow fans were generally enjoying the exhibition quality of the game, so they were cheering both sides equally. While this was very polite, it sucked the energy out of the stadium. In a real competitive game, you want some passion from the audience, as well as from the players.

And third, we were in the nosebleed section. I’m not complaining. It was lovely up there (albeit a little hot), especially since the field was spread out before us. I felt like an eagle. I also realized looking down on the field that soccer reminds me of WWI.

This is not as crazy an analogy as you might think. The players endlessly cycled back and forth over a few yards, constantly getting near each other’s goal and then being repulsed. Although each team played fluidly together, the nature of soccer meant there weren’t any set plays.

Watching it from up high, I thought that, in a way, this would have been what WWI’s trench warfare would have looked like to an alien being perched on a far-away planet, watching the war play out. The two sides faced off against each other and, up until the Americans came along, just endlessly pushed each other back and forth over the same 8 miles.

American football strikes me as being more like traditional American warfare. The battalion, or division, or unit, or whatever, comes up with a strategy and then charges ahead. Ideally, it gains ground and holds it. Less ideally, it gets pushed back and has to regroup. The discipline, though, requires unified forward motion, rather than an endlessly fluid back and forth.

When my kids played, I loved soccer because it made them run, which kids need, and I enjoyed watching my little darlings compete. Without one of my own kids on the field, I definitely like American football better than soccer.

** 2 **

In my earlier post, I said Hamas is worse than the Nazis were. One of the reasons I said that is that the Nazis valued their own (not their enemy’s, but their own) children. Hamas, however, has decided that its children’s greatest utility is to act the role of corpse — and the younger the Palestinian child, the more enthusiastically Hamas tries to turn it into a dead body.

It turns out that Hamas’s disdain for its children exists independent of an active war with Israel. By its own admission, Hamas used its children as slave labor to build the many tunnels under Israel. One-hundred-sixty of those children died.

I know I’m going to like the book because it touches upon a subject I’ve long blogged about, which is the death of the Jew in American culture. Jews no longer exist in American culture. That marks a sea change from the situation in most of the 20th century. From the 1910s through the 1970s, Jews were omnipresent, acting, singing, writing, producing, directing…. They made us laugh, cry, and think. That’s all vanished now. The decline of American Jewry’s role in American life has mirrored Israel’s rise and fall in the eyes of the world.

** 4 **

Antisemitism is a completely irrational hatred. In Islam, antisemitism is predicated upon the words of a 7th century “prophet” who resented the fact that the Jews refused to abandon their faith in favor of his newly created one. For those thankfully few Christians who still hew to old-time antisemitism, their hatred for all Jews in the present day is because, 2,000 years ago, a very small group of Jews aided Christ to his destiny by turning him over to the Romans. For Leftists, hatred of Jews was born out of a 19th century hatred for those few Jews who were visibly capitalist, and now arises from the fact that, until Obama, Israel was seen as inextricably intertwined with America, the bastion of capitalism. None of the preceding justifications for hating Jews springs from a rational source.

Because antisemitism is irrational, it leads to truly stupid outcomes, revealing brains so steeped in hatred they are incapable of thought. Exhibit A is the BBC’s insane, inane tweet about Hamas’s unilateral breach of one of the cease-fires:

Sarah Palin makes a good case for impeachment. Those who are opposed to immediate impeachment don’t look at President Obama’s conduct but, instead, look at the dynamics of impeachment: It makes for incredibly bad optics if Republicans impeach the first black president, especially right before an election. This means, of course, that Republicans are damned if they do (bad optics) and damned if they don’t (unconstitutional loose cannon in the White House).

Palin makes the point that, if we want to shift that dynamic, we need to educate the public so that more than 33% of them support impeachment:

Let’s go back to that poll I cited showing 33% of Americans agree with me on impeachment. It’s clear from the way these polls are conducted that most Americans aren’t aware of what constitutes impeachable offenses.

The Constitution says “high crimes and misdemeanors” are the basis for this serious remedy. The Framers used that term to mean a dereliction of duty, and the first duty of the president is to enforce our laws and preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton described impeachable offenses as “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He called them “political” offenses because they “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

[snip]

Impeachment isn’t necessarily for ordinary criminal acts, nor is it for bad political decisions or differences in opinion. We’re not saying, “Impeach him because his stimulus failed; he coddles Wall Street while dissing Main Street; he recklessly spends our tax dollars on skewed priorities, etc., etc.”

We’re saying he must be impeached for overstepping his Constitutional authority. Here are some examples: he broke the law in changing the Obamacare law by fiat, and he issued amnesty for illegal immigrants by fiat, and he committed fraud on the American people by lying that we could keep our health care if we like our health care, and he refused to secure our borders or halt this border crisis he caused. The list of abuse is long. Allowing any president to continue this lawlessness sets a precedent for future presidents that can allow destruction of our nation.

We’re acknowledging that there’s only one recourse in holding government accountable when led by a president who breaks the law. Remember the Constitution holds the president directly responsible for the executive branch. He can’t just vote “present” and keep feigning ignorance of all the scandals rocking his administration, any more than a mob boss can claim innocence because he didn’t personally do the hit. The buck stops with the guy at the top.

[snip]

Impeachment is the Constitution’s answer for a derelict, incompetent presidency, as well as for a lawless imperial presidency. Both describe the unprecedented problem we have with Obama.

** 7 **

AJStrata isn’t opposed to impeachment. He just says that it must wait until after the November election. In the meantime, he sees Obama as someone who is buying more than enough rope to hang himself. After all, executive actions are ephemeral, and can be undone as easily as they were done in the first place.

AJ thinks that Obama is trying to force impeachment before the election in the hope that it will hand Democrats a victory in November. The whole calculus changes — dramatically — if the Republicans sweep both House and Senate.

So, patience, everyone (including you, Sarah Palin). Patience is a great virtue and, as the next story shows, the lack of patience can be profoundly damaging. (Although in the case of the next story, thank God for impatience.)

** 8 **

I’ve pointed out in previous posts that, had Hamas been able to restrain itself from firing rockets into Israel, it would probably have successfully used its tunnels to invade Israel on Rosh Hashanah, killing thousands and kidnapping hundreds. Clarice Feldman makes an even better point:

The reason Hamas couldn’t resist firing rockets was because Israel was turning over every stone in an effort, first, to locate Eyal Yifrach, 19; Gilad Shaar, 16; and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, and then, once it was known they were murdered, to find their killers. (Incidentally, did I miss it or was President Obama completely silent about the brutal antisemitic murder of an American citizen? After all, Fraenkel held dual citizenship.)

So the real reason that Israel was able to deter a terror attack that would have rivaled in scope the 9/11 attack on Israel was because three young boys died at Hamas’s hands. I don’t know if it can, but I still hope that this knowledge brings some comfort to the boys’ families. In a weird way, it means that the boys did not die in vain, since their deaths almost certainly saved thousands of lives.

** 9 **

When I took my daughter to a college fair, I ended up talking to a young woman from Austin, Texas, which is a lovely city despite a Leftist insanity rivaled only by Berkeley and Ann Arbor. I commented, as I always do when I talk about Texas, that I loved it there, but that the heat was killing. The woman told me earnestly that it’s much worse now thanks to global warming. I spared my daughter the embarrassment of calling that young woman on her uninformed lunacy. I bet the woman also thinks Austin is both wetter and dryer before — two assumptions that are completely wrong.

Just so you can get a feel for what the United States would look like if Progressives were completely in control, check out the insane San Francisco landlord scene. To call what landlords own there “private property” is an extraordinary misnomer. It’s “private property” in name only:

Landlords are challenging San Francisco’s latest move to discourage evictions from rent-controlled apartments, an ordinance requiring them to pay displaced tenants the difference between their current rent and the amount needed to rent a similar unit at market rates for two years.

** 12 **

Hamas treats Jews and its own people like disposable objects. Israel treats Palestinians like human beings:

I’ve ranted here before about the fact that, when discussing the Left’s insistence that government should be able to give the Pill to young girls, no one mentions how dangerous hormone-based birth control devices are. It seems, though, that people are finally waking up to the fact that there’s a price to pay for messing with women’s hormones.

***

Walt Disney was a futurist because he believed that the future would be a wonderful time that would see Americans, and people around the world, enjoying better living through technology. Obama is a futurist too. He envisions a barren, parched wasteland with bazillions of starving people, among whom will be history professors passing judgment on today’s events — hence Obama’s perpetual concern with “being on the right side of history.” What Obama doesn’t grasp is that the world’s bad actors are not futurists. They are “here and now” -ists. Putin, in true George Washington Plunkitt fashion, saw his opportunity and took it, history be damned. What Putin understands, which Obama doesn’t, is that the victors get to write the history.

***

Back in August 2008, David Goldman foresaw the Russian (and American and Israeli) future. George Bush is not without guilt on this one. America as a whole, has been naive and credulous in dealing with Putin. In 2008, though, no one could have envisioned an American leader quite as bad as Obama. Goldman’s 2008 article posited Russians playing chess and Americans playing Monopoly. Obama, however, has been playing Chutes and Ladders.

***

In any event, whether the West is playing Monopoly or Candy Land, the Onion has a wonderful satirical piece in which Putin expresses his gratitude.

***

We all know (and the Left knows too) that Paul Ryan is not a racist for pointing out exactly what Obama pointed out: that American black men live within a damaged and damaging culture. Where Ryan failed, though, was his decision to bob and weave when the usual race-baiters labeled him as a racist. He apologized for being misunderstood and met with black leaders and did the usual sackcloth and ashes routine. What Ryan should have done — what every person of good will should do when the race-baiters call him names — was to come out swinging: “I am not a racist. You are the racist because you refuse to allow anyone to talk about the welfare state’s massive failures. Etc.” The moment anyone apologizes on this one for anything, even using the wrong punctuation, the race-baiters win.

***

On the subject of racism, affirmative action is one of those racist Leftist evils. While it may have had some merit in the first years after 1964 (and I doubt even that), it’s become poison in the decades since then. For more than fifty years, it’s told both whites and minorities that the latter need not try as hard because the system will raise them up anyway. This is a terrible message. Up until affirmative action, disfavored American groups raised themselves up by working twice as hard and by competing head-on with the entrenched classes. That’s the way to break racism (or anti-Catholicism or anti-Semitism). You try harder; you don’t try less hard. According to John Fund, it might be that some people are finally figuring this out.

***

Incidentally, affirmative action is why Obama got elected and it’s one of the reasons he will never be impeached. With that kind of job security, Obama doesn’t need to work hard and can, during the hours he does deign to work, go about freely de-valuing America.

***

I liked 300. A lot. I didn’t get to see the end though. With only 10 minutes to go, the liberal friend with whom I was watching it said, “This is disgusting,” turned the TV off, took out the disk, put it in the Netflix mailer, and that was that. I liked the movie for precisely the reasons Andrew Klavan liked it. I also fail to see how any sequel could work. The Spartan stand at Thermopylae was a unique moment in history. Any subsequent film will just be about a battle, not about an idea.

***

My son said that kids at his school are saying that the endless coverage about the missing Malaysia Airline is to cover for the debacle (from America’s viewpoint) in the Ukraine. Smart kids. The DiploMad says the same thing.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, a frequent guest of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow during the Bush years, described the situation in severe terms.

“I really have great trepidation over where we are headed,” Turley said. “We are creating a new system here. . . . The center of gravity is shifting, and that makes it unstable. Within that system you have a rise of an uber-presidency. There could be no greater danger for individual liberty. And I really think that the Framers would be horrified by that shift.”

The situation, Turley later said, is the “most serious constitutional crisis, I believe, in my lifetime.”

That lawlessness doesn’t just rest with Obama’s recent decision to ignore statutory deadlines regarding Obamacare and, instead, to impose his own deadlines in the hope that the worst of Obamacare won’t hit until after the 2014 elections. (And you thought it was bad now….) Instead, Obama’s lawlessness encompasses everything — the laws he refuses to enforce, the executive orders he uses with abandon to run around Congress, and his deep disdain for the United States Constitution.

It’s appalling (but, of course, not surprising) that congressional Democrats would rather see the country’s constitutional framework collapse than lay a finger on a renegade politician. Indeed, they’re so excited about their agenda’s successes (despite the public’s increasing disregard for those same Leftist initiatives) that congressional Democrats openly support the way in which Obama is making Congress irrelevant.

What’s depressing (but, of course, not surprising) is that it’s unlikely that, even if Republicans control both houses in Congress (which is a possibility in Obamacare’s wake), they too will do nothing to rein Obama in. Reining Obama in, of course, means impeaching the man. There is no other way to put the brakes on his conduct. Unfortunately, though, Obama has pretty much be inoculated against impeachment because of the “racism” charge that the Left uses to respond to every critique made against the man and his policies.

Republicans suspect — and are probably right — that no matter how dreadful Obamacare proves to be, and how low Obama’s polling numbers go, the mainstream media will deliberately foment race riots should Republicans make any effort to impeach the first black president. The fact that blacks constitute less than 20% of the population, and that not all will riot, is irrelevant. Nationwide race riots would have a devastating effect on America’s fabric.

The Constitution is very clear: Congress writes the laws; the President enforces them.

In light of Obama’s announcement today that he was unilaterally “improving” a law by ignoring its terms (i.e., the time limits contained within Obamacare), Veronique de Rugy asks a good question:

What authority does the president of the United States have to decide that he will or will not enforce some parts of the law that have become inconvenient for him politically or that are proven to have been a terrible idea?

There’s a simple answer to this excellent question. The limit to Obama’s authority lies in the Senate. The only thing that can stop a rogue president is impeachment — and a Senate with a Democrat majority will not allow conviction.

The real power to control Obama’s unlawful activities lies with the voters. So far, though, they’ve chosen not to exercise this power. Although Obama had been manifestly re-writing laws to suit his purpose before the 2012 election (e.g., immigration laws and Obamacare), the voters shrugged and kept the Senate in Democrat hands.

If voters in 2014 again return Democrats to the Senate in sufficient numbers to block impeachment, the voters have granted Obama the authority to ignore the limitations that the Constitution places upon him. It’s obviously not an express grant of authority, because the president is still violating the Constitution, but it’s an implicit grant of authority. Like the bribed police officer at the scene of a crime, voters will simply be looking the other way.

And speaking of 2014, there’s a Ricochet thread thinking about campaign slogans. This is the top suggestion: “If you don’t like your Democrat. you don’t have to keep him. Vote for ______.” I think it’s on the right track, but somehow a little unwieldy.

Given the record on which Obama and the Democrats will be running in 2014, what catchy slogans would you guys and gals suggest?

Every one of the above statements came directly from Obama’s mouth. That is, they were not relayed by his press office or parroted through spokespeople. Obama opened his mouth and there these words were. These were fundamental promises that Obama made in order to convince Americans not to lynch the lawmakers who engaged in procedural chicanery to pass a monstrous bill that none of them had read. (Or as Nancy Pelsoi explained, “But we have to pass the [health care ] bill so that you can find out what is in it.“)

The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.

These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law’s benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.

For anyone paying attention (i.e., any who was not a member of the liberal elite with his body so contorted by leftist ideology that his brain was pressed deeply into his own inferior orifice), it was inevitable that almost every individual health insurance policy in America would have to be canceled, because almost none of them would have the exquisite balance of mandatory coverages called for by Obamacare (interesting things such as pregnancy care for 90 year old men, etc.). For the insurers to add these things would (a) result in the cancellation of existing policies by operation of law and (b) inevitably force up the price of existing policies so that they contained things that aren’t insurance, but are maintenance. Bye-bye, old policies; hello, new price increases.

And again, you don’t need an Ivy League degree to figure these things out. Indeed, I do believe that an Ivy League degree impairs a person’s ability to figure out simple economic reality.

I’m running to pick up kids now, so I don’t have time to think about this question, let alone research it, so I’ll just ask it: Can a blatant lie of this magnitude, a fraud on an extraordinary scale, justify impeachment? (And I know this is theoretical, because no one would have the courage in Washington, even if they had a sizable majority, to impeach the first black president for fraud and deceit.)

If you want my opinion about Obama’s serial dishonesty, it’s because he’s a malignant narcissist. Although these people have long-term goals, and long memories when it comes to holding grudges, one significant part of their brain exists only in the present: Whatever they say is dictated by the needs of the moment. There are no such things as absolute truths, incontestable facts, or binding promises. When malignant narcissists open their mouths to speak, their “truth” is what will serve them best at that particular moment. They’ll pass a lie detector test at that moment because, to them, absolute truth is identical to immediate need. And when they blatantly lie about a lie (“I didn’t draw a red line; the world drew a red line”), they’ll pass that lie detector test too because their lizard brains are telling them “If you need to say it right now, then it’s the truth.”

The thought of impeaching Obama is emotionally satisfying, but Thomas Lifson is right that it’s a mistake. I mean, think about it: how good as a tactic if the best possible outcome is that Joe Biden becomes President? Obama, meanwhile, will become a race martyr, and the country might be torn apart beyond repair. What Thomas argues, instead, is that conservatives can play a much more strategic game, with great long term benefits. Keep these scandals going, instead of turning the focus solely onto Obama the martyr, and we’ll have ever more evidence indicting American Progressivism as a failure that has corruption, abuse, and tyranny built within it.

I was out this morning getting my oil changed — and learning that it will cost almost $2,000 to fix my car from its recent run-in with a low post. When I got home, I found an interesting message on my answering machine.

It’s the recorded voice of Dennis Kucinich begging me to “Press 1 now” on my phone to be added to the “growing list” of people calling for George Bush’s impeachment. I don’t know how to tell Kucinich this, but George Bush is leaving office, with or without impeachment, in six months.

Impeachment is, in any event, a dumb idea. Even though Clinton used the White House as his own private cat house, committed perjury himself, and encouraged others to lie as well, I thought the impeachment against him was vindictive politics that would backfire. I think the same holds true in this tit-for-tat attempt to dislodge Bush, or just to humiliate him, with the end of his presidency drawing near.

It’s also unusually stupid — and this is saying a lot even for Kucinich — considering the potential fall-out here. Clinton’s crimes were his own. In this case, however, any Democrat calling for impeachment should consider the number of Congress people (Democrats included) who had possession of precisely the same information as George Bush, and who were as gung-ho for war as he was. Any attack on Bush is necessarily going to create a wide-ranging defense that attacks a whole bunch of Congress people as well. (You know, thinking about it, that’s not such a bad thing, is it?)